The present invention relates generally to systems and methods for scheduling the preparation and presentation of content. More particularly, the invention is directed to scheduling content for web sites and web pages.
To remain relevant, many Web sites must constantly update information displayed on their Web pages. For example, as news stories break, news web sites must update web pages appropriately so that a user seeking news get the latest information. Various other types of information must be updated at more or less frequent intervals. Sports information changes daily. Stock information changes in minutes. Moreover, for merchandise-based web sites, the products sought by consumers will change based on seasons, holidays, and day of the week. On the other hand, some information may be of a recurring nature such as syndicated columns, weekly specials, and so on. The task of maintaining such information may be enormously complex as various sections and features of any given web page change at unrelated frequencies.
Adding to the complexity is the fact that some information and features on a web page may be related to other information on the web page. For example, it may be desirable to update weather information at certain times prior to events such as ball games, shows, and the like. In the case of on-line catalogs, certain sale items may be related to each other. As a result, more than one item on the web page must be updated simultaneously. Hence, there is a need for a system and method for providing a consistent framework for managing the scheduling of web site content.
The invention provides a framework for controlling and organizing the content and timing of changes to the content for Web sites, Web pages, etc. The invention uses a hierarchical data structure to maintain and organize content and to relate the content in time. Nodes in the hierarchy have a portion indicative of content to be displayed and a portion indicative of a time to display the content. Accordingly, for a given time T, a display process traverses the hierarchy to determine all nodes having content to be displayed. Any node having its time portion within a given time window of time T will be selected for display.
In one embodiment, the content is kept in a tree of nodes. The top level node is the root node that points to web site nodes. The web site nodes may have a series relationship to one another so that during a first time interval, the web site is defined by a tree of nodes subordinate to one of the web site nodes and at a second time interval the web site is defined by a tree of nodes subordinate to another one of the web site nodes. This series relationship carries though the entire tree structure and hence applies to web pages and web page slots (i.e. a portion of a web page). At every level of the tree, scheduling information is added so that it is know when that node in the tree (and the node""s sub-tree) is live, and what node in the tree will replace it when it expires. Since this is done at every level of the tree, the system provides flexibility of having as many or as few levels of scheduling as is desired.
Each node additionally contains content or a pointer to content. Hence, after a tree is populated with appropriate node content associations, the information in the tree can be viewed as it would appear at any moment in time by filtering out any nodes that are not yet xe2x80x9clivexe2x80x9d or that have expired within a given time window of a selected time. Additionally, the invention can be used to create comprehensive views of the content as it appeared for a day, a week, a month, or any chosen time period.